On the Microsoft/Wikipedia Uproar

So far as I understand things from this article on the subject, it appears that Microsoft is in trouble with the Wikipedia community over its hiring of a bloggr to make “corrections” to an article that the corporation felt was inappropriately slanted in favor of an open-source document standard that competed with one of its products.

Now, I suppose it would have been wise for Microsoft to be more transparent about the issue. But I’m pretty sure that they weren’t trying to be evil sneaks. According to the CNN article I read, they hired blogger Rick Jelliffe — who is also CTO of an Australia-based computing company — to review the article and make changes based on his independent and informed judgment. However, both parties had agreed that Jelliffe’s re-writes were not subject to review or revision by Microsoft. Also, Jelliffe was being paid for his time and his perspective, not the specific copy he was writing.

Prior to hiring Jelliffe, Microsoft made attempts through Wikipedia community-sanctioned channels to flag pieces of the article that they felt were slanted, but got nowhere.

Obviously, they should have handled the situation differently. Had I been Microsoft, I would have had someone in the group responsible for the document standard to blog about the situation. A public call to Wikipedia’s most prolific editors, asking them to give the article another look would probably have gone over a lot better than the course of action Microsoft ultimately chose. But a closer look at their specific actions does show that they were at least attempting to approach the matter ethically.